Jiveturkey124:As usual another excellent article that isnt meant for mere laughs but to actually change the industry, a true observation of human fallacies.

Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.

I look forward to that day. Yahtzee was the main reason I got into this site, and I've found it to be an incredibly insightful and respectful appreciation of gaming culture. And in Yahtzee's case, with lots of swears.

OT: I can't agree with Yahtzee more. Movies and video games are supposed to be about telling a story, either with compelling settings and characters in the former, or engaging gameplay and environmental immersion in the latter. This is why I'm such a huge Myst fanboy. It's so simple. As Douglas Adams put it "A beautiful void". There's nothing there! At least, not at first glance. Play the series and (think of it what you will) there's an incredibly deep narrative being told through such simple mechanisms.

But then, games like these, God of War, Dante's Inferno (a travesty on so many levels), and other over-the-top-robot-punching-dragon spectacles, you lose all meaning in terms of theme, mood, atmosphere, plot, characterization, and all other literary merits. I see video games as like interactive novels, or movies. If we want video games to be considered art, like these, we need to lay off the video game equivalent of a strip club. All looks, not touching, and expensive.

YZ, does have a very valid point. Also to add is, empathy. You can't relate as much as to Kratos, compared to a Heavy Rain character. Well Gran Turismo 5 is coming out tomorrow, so try relating to a Bugatti Veyron going 400km/h!

Almost sounds like a coopted statement based on Stalin's "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million, a statistic." line. Makes sense though, and it's not like anyone is going to spend time trying to make 10 million sundaes.

Bobic:You complain that those bosses are too big yet a few weeks ago you praised shadow of the colossus. I see a little inconsistency in your ramblings.

It made sense in Shadow of the Colossus. In some games, like Force Unleashed, it was just "HOLY SH*T!" for holy sh*t's sake. That gets old fast, and it robs actually powerful moments of their appeal. I thought it was a pretty simple concept.

You really seem to be talking about anime in too broad a sense. There is a tremendous amount of variety in anime and anime is by no means any one thing. It's many things. I'm pretty sure that even Yahtzee would agree with me on this one. And if you are describing Dragonball and Naruto as realistically inclined then I really can't say that I agree with you. For example in the very first episode of Naruto the very first thing we see is a giant demon fox and in Dragonball we have things like dinosaurs that still exist for no apparent reason and cars that you can carry around in tiny capsules. If you want realistically inclined then I would suggest titles like Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and Monster. Now THOSE are realistically inclined.

You misunderstood me.

Yes, I know anime is very broad, I watch a lot of it myself. But anime series tend to fall prey to this, particularly "run on series", or series that are "stretched" past their original script (e.g.: Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Dragonball, to a lesser extent, and despite remaining quite good, Rurouni Kenshi...etc). Anime already tends to start off on more loose interpretations of reality, and "run-on"/"never ending" series inevitably fall prey to power scaling... And an anime that started a "a bit over the top" quickly degenerates into "ridiculous super powers world-ending abominations".

Naruto is a good example. The ninjas in Naruto start out as your typical pop culture ninja: super fast, very strong, and with quite a few "tricks" up their sleeve. You had one of two "titans", but that was it.

...Halfway through the series we're dealing with monsters that can plough through an entire city in a hit, summon sand tsunamis and assorted monsters the size of mountains, to say nothing of Itachi and the Akatsuki freaks...

Dragonball is another text book example. You start with "bordering on super human" fighters, who are considered the very elite. Songoku is some sort of super human being for his capacities, and all the other "very strong" opponents he finds tend to be conquerors or leaders of armies of some kind. And these are the very, absolute, elite best. Mostly they can punch people through a wall or two, and a leap a few duzen extra feet in the air. At one point, Goku is considered some kind of absurdly rare "chosen one" for his capacity to shoot a basic fire ball (the Kamehameha).

Things quickly spin out of control after the Piccollo saga, and by the middle of DragonBall Z we're reached a ridiculous level of fighting where artists just decided "fuck it" and fights are essentially invisible, and everyone that can't fire a fireball without thinking is some kind of retarded failure.

By the depressingly bad ending of DragonBall GT, anyone that can't destroy an entire planet with a punch on a bad day is not even worth mentioning as anything other than comic relief.

It's the whole reason I've taken to watching animes that come with a predetermined beginning, middle and end. First, because the story is far more "focused", with basically no fillers, and second because there's a lower chance of running into absurd power scaling.

That said, you mixed up the "realistic" part. Things don't have to be realistic, they have to be coherent. Lightsabers aren't "realistic", but they make sense in the universe. Being able to pull down a Star Destroyer, which, by the way, is roughly a mile long by roughly 0.6 miles wide star ship that carries around an army, with pin point precision without even moving is not.

The problem isn't being realistic or not, it's when the world defines it's own realism, then fucks it right up in favour of giving everyone super powers.

A1: But then again consistency really doesn't seem to be George Lucas's strong point. For example Leland Chee, the person in charge of maintaining the Star Wars continuity database called Holocron, at one point outright stated that George Lucas's view of the Star Wars expanded universe was "constantly evolving".

Let me break this to you, from one one former fan to another: George Lucas is a hack.

Yes, I said that. George Lucas by himself is a clueless fucking hack. He has some good ideas, but he hasn't the slightest idea what to do with them. His original 3 movies become the gold they did because he was constantly riddled by technical limitations and a team that constantly criticized his insanity. These people kept him in check. These people went away after the first 3 movies, and were substituted by brown nosing fucks who were afraid to tell Georgy "...Yeah, this is a bad idea". On top of that, the original Star Wars were such a colossal hit that George became the prodigal "golden boy" of movie making. Nobody dared criticize him, and he somehow got the idea that he owed it all to himself... And that he could write... And didn't really need anyone else...

To top it all off, Georgy went from "underdog" to "monopoly guy". He went from being the guy with ideas nobody gave a chance to, to one of the big boys that could do anything he wanted, no matter how stupid... He developed a taste for money, and lost his interest in artistic integrity and the like...

The result is what you see today: A creatively bankrupt franchise milking old whore.

To me, Star Wars is Episodes IV, V and VI. With maybe some room for Kyle Katarn and the Jedi Knight series, and the first KOTOR. Everything else I've personally relayed to the garbage bin of "half baked fanfic author masturbation".

Bobic:You complain that those bosses are too big yet a few weeks ago you praised shadow of the colossus. I see a little inconsistency in your ramblings.

True, but there's a difference between very slow creatures that you'd have to spend your time on working to get tot he one weakpoint that can take out the monster. The beasts he spoke of are fast. And really, c'mon, the beast that Starkiller had to face was four times larger than a Rancor! And put one extra umph to the Rancor's size and it's approximately the size of the Colossus's. So, really....

So too much is too much. If you can destroy a Star Destroyer with the force alone, then there's something wrong with this picture. Never overpower the individual that's suppose to be your uber power. And yes, I know, time's changed, which means "NOW" if Starkiller is that strong and actually a part of the series, then Skywalker will eventually be ten times as powerful. Think about that...

Now we see the point of the whole cloning nonsense. Boba Fett is a clone, Starkiller is cloned and reborn. Lucas has introduced cloning as freaking retcon white-out. And when these new Star Wars films come out supposedly set thousands of years in the future. What? Emperor Palpatine? They cloned him?

*facepalm*

Kinda makes you wonder why they didn't simply clone either an army of Starkiller or an army of Darth Vaders.

Why build an army of Jango Fetts when you could build an army of guy that can crush an AT-ST by waving his hand?

Presumably because that gentleman had an obedience problem. An unstoppable army is only a good thing to keep around if you can control it.

That's a solid point. I'm all for awesomeness in video games, but if you want your "awesome" scenes to be memorable, it has to be something visceral, something that gets in your head in some way, like it could almost be you doing those things. The Indiana Jones analogy illustrated it perfectly.

It seems to me like the higher-ups at in the games industry have been acting like a bunch of dimbulbs over the past years. Sure, movies have always had a problem with over-sequelization, but it was never so bad as what's been happening to video games. And in the early days of the medium, "indie" movie developers were required to push the envelope of what could be achieved artistically, but eventually - eventually the industry finally grew up and moved on.Ditto for horrible storytelling. Ditto for over-the-top, unappealing, "oh come on" action scenes. When are these guys going to smarten up and start and spending their hundreds of millions on developing games that are actually enjoyable?

Yahtzee, I'm sure you're going to be annoyed with me for doing this, but you summed up one of my major disappoints in the prequel Star Wars movies. Return of the Jedi had an awesome space battle in it, along with a great ground battle (I like Ewoks, sorry). So, with technology the way it is now, I was gitty with joy when the prequels were released. I spent many a day wondering how they would make space and ground battles look now.

Instead, like you said, there was too much. Too much debris, too many flashes, too many explosions. I couldn't follow any of it. And, as you also pointed out, because the technology was so costly, the scenes themselves were only two or three seconds or a blinding explosion. Such a let down. So yeah, this even applies to Star Wars, although it's not the only problem with it.

Really in the sense of it all, I do agree with Yahtzee that they're trying a weeeee bit too hard to make it 'too awesome'. Kill a Star Destroyer with the will of the force alone? Desintigrating bodies with just the power of the force? Facing a beast that can eat a Rancor because it's ten times bigger than 'em? Really, too much, too much. I ended up looking over all of these, and just kinda got annoyed by it all. Besides, the cloning doesn't make a lick of sense because all the clones....

Spoiler: Click to ViewPHA+R28gQ3Jhenkgby5vPC9wPg==

Kratos on one end, was a God once when he fought with them, became a God after his defeat and gained power through the titans, and gained it again through the use of killing the Gods the next time over. And he had the personality of Marbels. Does that make you hate him? Nooo.he was already like that from the get go, so he's uber awesome.

And reading another post. Yes, i agree, Star Wars is IV, V, VI without shame, and I'll only add like..one small series to it, addition of Mara Jade because despite anything, I like the fact that Luke is a uber power, and gets a redhead...yeah.redhead.

And I like the KOTOR series, though never got the time to play it...boo-hoo-hoo ;.;

Does this theory work for games based in the future? Look at Mass Effect and its massive Sovereign. Sovereign is a massive alien spaceship/alien himself. How can something like that be based in reality? Or even the citadel, that was a massive and ancient space station that a long, long extinct people built that hasn't been completely destroyed by some cosmic force over the insanely long time it has been around?

Or is it just the fact that people don't know what to expect from the future, so therefore they can accept it because they just don't know that something like this could be built sometime in the future?

Jiveturkey124:As usual another excellent article that isnt meant for mere laughs but to actually change the industry, a true observation of human fallacies.

Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.

Actually, I kind of dread that day because he's still an amateur at game criticism. Almost all of his works are filled with fallacies, even now.The problem with both of these cases is that they don't want to put fear, they want to empower. You're not supposed to be afraid with Kratos because he's a god killer with amazing strength. Plus, he's comparing this to Condemned, which is a Horror game. No duh you're more likely to be afraid. He misses the point of these games. I want to know what gave him the idea that a game where you beat up monsters, gods and titans wanted to instill fear?

Yahtzee makes a solid point once again. It instantly brought the Darth Maul/Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon fight to my mind. I remember thinking how stupid it was for its absurdly over choreographed nature. They looked like they were dancing, not fighting. Luke vs Vader from the original trilogy had so much more emotion and realism behind it and it was all the more interesting for it.

well by the official canon luke was supposed to the be the strongest jedi ever bar none, and i doubt he could destroy the death star just by thinking about it, but then again i never read the eu books and other crap lucas put out.

Azaraxzealot:i dont exactly understand how a game can be "too awesome" i mean, look at Saints Row 2, that was ridiculous in almost every way but people accept thator inFamous or Prototype, both very ridiculous but also a spectacle to be enjoyed.

besides that, i always thought directors were trying to go for less "flash" and "bang" because of the rise of "realistic" games like Cash-In Of Duty and Grand Theft Auto 4.

Yeah but in saints row 2 it was the little things that made it funny, like when you first walk off the prison boat and stumble across and old lady throwing a pimp face first into a lamppost. Its not realistic, or even physically possible, but at least you can comprehend the physics involved. Whereas what Yahtzee here is talking about is something like Just Cause 2 where you can stand on top a jet fighter at top speed 10 miles above a tropical island, place a lump of c4 on it, cleanly jump off, pull a parachute out of your arse then detonate the c4. There are so many things that should not work in that situation yet on screen it just happens and expects you to go along. And although the whole point of just cause is that you can do amazing nonsensical stunts I find the game demands far too much willing disbelief. If you clear out a whole military base in Just Cause 2 it looses all meaning because you used massive regenerating health, a rapid fire rocket launcher, a pouch of infinite parachutes that don't catch on anything and a grappling hook that is infinitely strong while somehow being unable to tear your arm clean off in the process. You didn't win a fight, you used an atom bomb to mow your lawn.

if you watched his review of Just Cause 2 and read the Dead Rising 2 extra punctuation you'll see that he REALLY enjoyed just cause 2, so obviously it wasn't too much

Jiveturkey124:As usual another excellent article that isnt meant for mere laughs but to actually change the industry, a true observation of human fallacies.

Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.

Actually, I kind of dread that day because he's still an amateur at game criticism. Almost all of his works are filled with fallacies, even now.The problem with both of these cases is that they don't want to put fear, they want to empower. You're not supposed to be afraid with Kratos because he's a god killer with amazing strength. Plus, he's comparing this to Condemned, which is a Horror game. No duh you're more likely to be afraid. He misses the point of these games. I want to know what gave him the idea that a game where you beat up monsters, gods and titans wanted to instill fear?

Empowering is fine, but the key trait that two of them SHOULD share is that the fights fee like something is happening, something is really going down, there is a challenge. Kratos may be a death machine but when he's fighting something so incredibly huge, we should be given the impression that it can actually beat him, that it is a challenge in some way other than just in gameplay. But nup, Kratos just uses the magic powers of rage to tear through his opponent like a hot knife through butter. That certianly empowers, alright, but if there's no real conflict or challenge other than "how fast can Kratos kill this giant guy?" in the storyline, then there's no reason to give a shit. It's not about fear, it's about offering something that the player sees as... I dunno, genuine. That was his point about CGI scenes, they may have a shitload of cool stuff but in the end, having all that stuff packed into one place and having the actor go about something so incredibly unreal in a way that is simply unbelievable is the problem because suddenly, there's no reason to care, nothing to get inside your head because it's all so clearly fake.

Shadow of the Colossus managed to make the giant enemies seem believable in a way which makes your character seem average and unskilled. God of War should have tried to make the giant enemies believable in a way that still makes Kratos seem like a rage-filled nutjob. As it is, Kratos just seems compeltely unstoppable, and that removes and traction the situation might have had with the player's involvement in the scene.

AceAngel:5 out of 6 people missed the articles point (again). Honestly, I think Yahtzee should just write a swear dictionary, cause I honestly think he's wasting his time...poor man.

There is a lot of very well-constructed criticism thrown at him, but most of the things people say seem to come down to not grasping some of the subtleties and reasoning behind what he's trying to say.

And now, to go off-topic!

Lord_Kristof:I'm worried a bit about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, because it's one of those games which seem to work backwards in time. Human Revolution is a prequel, but the trailer alone features technology that is too advanced for the first game, and even the second. What, did they suddenly forget all about those cool upgrades and just started over? Like in Star Wars during the Empire era? Strange stuff, that.

The sad part is, it isn't even something anyone wants from a Deus Ex game. Even Invisible War gave you stealth options, but having the new guy spin round a room slicing up armoured guards with arm-mounted swords simply does not make any sense, in a way that cannot be chalked up to the hardware limitations of the pervious games and also removes the need to take any alternate paths. Confronting, say, 5 enemies head-on was pretty hard in the original despite the player character being, apparently, a walking example of the height of technology, and a bona fide superoldier.

Now we've got this bloke pulling stuff completely out of his arse to do things which people don't even want from a Deus Ex game, long before humanity develops the tech to come anywhere close to that kind of performance. I'm all for new direction, but if old JC pulled off even half of that shit, everyone who knows him would respond with "JC, what the FUCK was that, man?" before then going on to remind him that killing all who stand in his way makes him a bit of a reprehensible fucker.

Then, IRL, it would be trashed for being yet another mindless shooter stanking up the market and it never would have gotten two sequels. I'm worried that this might happen to the new one, because putting "Deus Ex" in the title of the game sets a standard people will expect of it, namely, creating an atmosphere of tension and paranoia in which the player feels like an incredible supersoldier but still needs to use their skill, cunning and intelligence to make the right choices, allowing them to use whatever their specialties are to get through a level, one way or another. If new guy can just kick the shit out of a load of enemies without even handling a gun, then where's the point?

If we're supposed to accept that this guy fits with canon, then I also expect to hear this in the original game: "man, all our augmented agents sure are a piece of shit compared to those guys we had fucking ages ago. What happened to them? did we suddenly just forget how to make our agents really badass?"

"Gun barrels can only burst by having some obstruction in the barrel or by overloading with powder. Any gun barrel can be burst by misuse or by carelessly loading smokeless powder, but no barrel will burst by using factory loaded ammunition, provided there is no obstruction or foreign substance inside the barrel. When a gun barrel bursts at the breech or chamber, it is caused by an overloaded shell, and when it bursts in the center or near the muzzle, it is caused by some obstruction, such as a dent, snow, water, etc."

Instead, like you said, there was too much. Too much debris, too many flashes, too many explosions. I couldn't follow any of it. And, as you also pointed out, because the technology was so costly, the scenes themselves were only two or three seconds or a blinding explosion. Such a let down. So yeah, this even applies to Star Wars, although it's not the only problem with it.

In the third movie, there are like billions of these small colored explosions.. with no point of origin or any effect on the battlefield whatsoever. Just more s--- to distract the viewer. IIRC On Kassyk they were green and on the other planet they were pink-ish.And the starting space battle have these countless warships just shooting at eachother at spitting range.. in space.. riiight. Looks cool? Yeah. Do i like it? Nope. I mean, cmon. Why arent they fighting using smart military tactics for a change? The viewer is more than smart enough to understand and appreciate it.But most battles in the SW films just look like medieval melee battles (with all the confusion and chaos) but with blaster guns, tanks, space ships and lightsabers. Universal maximum weapon range: 150 meters. Universal doctrine: You fight in melee with all and any weapon. Long range shooting and cover is for cowards.

When the power level is just too high, we just cant connect with the hero/story/world anymore. How can you justify that a trooper/door/boss is any problem whatsoever when you can force a billion-ton ship to crash where you want, at will. At that point just give us the "YOu WIN" screen and its over. There is no credible challenge that can meet that kind of power without being a god of some sort.

Azaraxzealot:i dont exactly understand how a game can be "too awesome" i mean, look at Saints Row 2, that was ridiculous in almost every way but people accept thator inFamous or Prototype, both very ridiculous but also a spectacle to be enjoyed.

besides that, i always thought directors were trying to go for less "flash" and "bang" because of the rise of "realistic" games like Cash-In Of Duty and Grand Theft Auto 4.

Have you even played any of the most recent COD's? The graphics may be on the grey/brown/dull-side but I wouldn't call it's action (one squad saving the world) by any stretch of the imagination "realistic".

Hence why I love it when MoH made it about 2-3 different squads, and then endgame wasn't abotu saving the world

I want everyone to have a gander at Super Robot Wars, any of them really but I feel Alpha 3 makes it's point the most felt, now these games are by no means 'contained' it's a big universe spanning war between some of the most over the top robots in all of existance. But it works in THAT setting and even with your army the final battle still feels FINAL. Your cast come from every different walk in life, a highschool student who stumbled into this mess by accident, trained soldiers, those related to tragedy, an alien general, a cyborg and his AI robot compatriots all fueled through sheer determination. And yet they present this in a way that for this universe? it's believable.

I can believe that Shinji Ikari isn't a total wuss who's going to cry because the people around him are good, positive people acting as friends and mentors. I can accept that the premier Super Robot Pilot Kouji Kabuto can sit down and have a nice chat with Amuro Ray. Because even though there as different as night and day the universe makes it believable.

Now 'Believable' isn't the same as 'Realistic'.

I can BELIEVE that an alien race named the Balmarians actually exist in this universe with there own alien social structure and unique tech level. And I can believe that they present a threat to the heroes of the game. I am not under any illusion that it's 'realistic' it is NOT realistic for a delivery boy no matter how good a martial artist he is would ever be allowed to take his giant robot to go beat aliens. It's not realistic that so MANY fantastical varied robots can all exist with such varying tech levels.

Why use GM's when you have Jeigans? How is Daitarn 3 a 120 foot tall transforming death machine when a gundam is only 18 feet? and how can they fight along side Arm Slaves which are only a measly 8 or 9 feet tall?

But we accept it because the universe makes it believable, even if it's unrealistic.

In Starwars I can accept that a paladin with a laser sword can fight a deathknight with a laser sword. you made it believable even if those weapons could never really work and people could never really have those powers.

The Death Star destroyed by 1 ship and a missile? completely believable even in real life when such a huge target could be taken out by a single ship.

Force powers I'll buy, hell I even buy Cade Skywalkers healing/harm powers in the Legacy comics because it seems believable siunce NOBODY TREATS IT AS NORMAL, they treat it as a frightening force that should not be tapped and is so far off the slippery slope that it's not worth considering.

Cade can't kill an entire army, he's swayed more between the sith and jedi than most people sway between different meals for dinner and yet it's believable because deep down he's a frightened guy running away from his fears rather than confronting them.

Think of Megas XLR or One Piece, neither of them is 'Realistic' but both are 'Believable'

... well okay One Piece has the Cyborgs which STRETCH Belivability but for the most part it weeves a darn good narrative.

Megas is cheesy and over the top and is in no way realistic. But the characters, there interactions make it seem believable.

TFU and it's sequal weren't 'Believable' and when your not realistic or believable you have nothing.

People said he liked Shadow of the Colossus for the huge boss battles, but within SotC it was believable that a guy, frail and weak but cunning could take down something so large it was beyond scale.

Dioxide20:Does this theory work for games based in the future? Look at Mass Effect and its massive Sovereign. Sovereign is a massive alien spaceship/alien himself. How can something like that be based in reality? Or even the citadel, that was a massive and ancient space station that a long, long extinct people built that hasn't been completely destroyed by some cosmic force over the insanely long time it has been around?

Or is it just the fact that people don't know what to expect from the future, so therefore they can accept it because they just don't know that something like this could be built sometime in the future?

Well, since Yathzee is talking about a sci-fi game and the sci-fi genre includes futuristic stuff, I'm gonna say yes, this covers futuristic games. As for your other questions: Sovereign: Play ME 2, they explain this at the end. Citadel: ME mentions a 'cycle of extintion". The last victims (the Protheans) were killed 50,000 years ago and the Citadel is the Reapers way of entering the galaxy from darkspace, so they could easily fix it up (or have the Keepers do it, that is what they were built for). Also, it is entirely plausible that the Citadel has super-strong shields.

Jiveturkey124:As usual another excellent article that isnt meant for mere laughs but to actually change the industry, a true observation of human fallacies.

Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.

I look forward to that day. Yahtzee was the main reason I got into this site, and I've found it to be an incredibly insightful and respectful appreciation of gaming culture. And in Yahtzee's case, with lots of swears.

Episode 5: Yoda pulls a star fighter out of the swamp with great effort. Luke pulls his lightsaber from the snow with great effort... I know, budding appretice, but still)

After that it's basically playing a big game of "I one up'd you bitch!" until starkiller reaches all the way into fucking space and rips a star destroyer out of the skies... This man couldn't beat the emporer or vader? COME ON!

Vader is all machine. THe force flows through all living things, hence why Anikin Skywalker lost so much power when he lost his arms and legs and had them replaced with metal... I mean... Spoilers... Oops...

And if you can rip a star destroyer from the sky, you can crush a man like a fucking bug... But they had to make epic fight sequences

Jiveturkey124:As usual another excellent article that isnt meant for mere laughs but to actually change the industry, a true observation of human fallacies.

Yahtzee Croshaw is the John Stewart of Gaming, give it a couple more years and I see Yahtzee leaving the simple internet media and branching out into the public's eye.

Actually, I kind of dread that day because he's still an amateur at game criticism. Almost all of his works are filled with fallacies, even now.The problem with both of these cases is that they don't want to put fear, they want to empower. You're not supposed to be afraid with Kratos because he's a god killer with amazing strength. Plus, he's comparing this to Condemned, which is a Horror game. No duh you're more likely to be afraid. He misses the point of these games. I want to know what gave him the idea that a game where you beat up monsters, gods and titans wanted to instill fear?

If he's an amateur, you're not even in scratching distance of him.Horror game or not, you want to feel your emotions evoked, to find yourself in front of a challenge that you may be apprehensive to approach. You have to be realistic and relatable if you want the player to feel even remotely connected to the characters and the process at hand. Games that pride themselves as ridiculous don't have to deal with this. Saints Row 2's reckless abandon of realism and Team Fortress 2's charming art style can attest to this. But any game that wants to have a semblance of realistic struggle needs to have some sense of scope. "Empowerment"? Hardly. Whatever empowerment God of War 3 grants is easily offset by the amount of detachment to the game you feel once you become to powerful.

To put this into perpective, can you imagine playing Grand Theft Auto 4 as the mayor of SimCity? No, you can't. You can't imagine that kind of gritty realism when you're conjuring up tornadoes. The struggles in Max Payne become laughable. When you're a god among men, there are no interesting men.

Totally agree.I'm a Star Wars fan, but I think the franchise is one of the prime offenders here. If you think about Force Unleashed, or The Clone Wars, or everything Yoda does in the second and third episodes... it's too much. It doesn't make any sense. Other SW games have symptoms of that, but in Jedi Knight when you use Force Lightning, it feels as if this is a bit over the top, but not too much. And then you've got Yoda crashing two space cruisers in the air using the Force. What the hell? It's just not fun anymore.

Fortunately, I don't think it's a common problem with video games. It does happen in titles like God of War because they are over the top by definition... I'm worried a bit about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, because it's one of those games which seem to work backwards in time. Human Revolution is a prequel, but the trailer alone features technology that is too advanced for the first game, and even the second. What, did they suddenly forget all about those cool upgrades and just started over? Like in Star Wars during the Empire era? Strange stuff, that.